ABSTRACT

Italian architectural culture of the 1980s often used the work of Italo Calvino to explain its conceptual premises, especially his books Invisible Cities and Six Memos for the Next Millennium. In terms of visibility, some recent Italian architecture has been seeking media exposure rather than "thinking through images", as Calvino wrote. Concerning multiplicity, Italian architecture has often been incapable of getting rid of the twofold impasse of excessive coherence and unrestrained eclecticism. Identity is not eternal and not always the same. It is rather the same as it is constantly changing, not as a confirmation of itself but in dialectical relationship with the 'other' and the 'elsewhere'. In other words, identity is a project. This problematic identity is also expressed in small buildings like the pavilion of the bus stop by Franco Purini: an internally very complex box, similar to Peter Eisenman's spatial and linguistic experiments of the 1960s and 1970s.